Tournaments: Pressure the short stacks
Throughout the tournament, you have to keep working on making small additions to your stack wherever possible. That way, when you take a chance in a big pot, a lot of these small additions will cover you if your contribution if you lose. One of the best ways of making small additions is by attacking small stacks.
Let's say it's folded around to you, you make a blind stealing raise on the button with J-10 and the big blind (a fairly short stack) calls you raise. The flop is 8-7-7 and he checks to you. Some players get a bit confused as to what they should do here. On most occasions, they put their opponent on a hand like A-Q or K-Q suited… and on most occasions, they’re right. In my opinion is that you should move all-in immediately if you have a good stack and he has a fairly short stack.
If he calls, you will almost certainly have outs against his hand and you may wind up collecting a nice little addition to your stack. But on most occasions, you win the pot right there and then, simply because players with shorter stacks want to flop a pair – minimum – before they are willing to call and all-in bet or move all-in themselves. As a result, you should bully around shorter stacks within reason and when it appears likely that the flop didn’t help him. Just keep chipping away at them and if all goes to plan, you will make a small addition to your stack and their stack will be marginalized to the point where they will be ‘forced’ to move all in with a mediocre hand.
But there is one very important exception. Some players will become incredibly wild and reckless when they have a short stack. They simply take the view that there is no point trying to recover gradually, so they may as well throw in the remainder of the stack at the next reasonable opportunity and try to get lucky and double up. I once made the mistake of trying to bully around a player. I had Q-10 and the flop was 8-6-5. I moved all in thinking that I would mop up the preflop bets, but he was a reckless sort who was in the “go hard or go home” frame of mind.
To my surprise, he had A-4 – a call he would never make if he had a good stack in front of him. Neither of us improved and his ace-high won the pot. The lesson to learned is this: if you are going to try and bully a short stack, make sure that they are interested in surviving as long as they can. Don’t bully a player who appears to have lost hope and will simply throw his stack in at the next available opportunity to double up.
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